Last night, John and I sat down to watch the Huw Edwards drama which Channel 5 showed last week. It was that or Virgin River or the Hotel Inspector.

Watching a drama about someone you vaguely know was bound to be a strange experience. What I wasn’t expecting, but should have, was that it was a profoundly uncomfortable viewing experience.

I had lunch with Huw Edwards back in 2021, when all this woeful saga was going on. I can’t quite remember how it came about, as I had never met him before, but I dutifully turned up at the Langham hotel, opposite Broadcasting House in Portland Place, looking forward to having a chat with the man who was Britain’s premier news broadcaster. In all honesty, I was flattered to be asked.

While I never suspected him of doing anything like the things he has been found guilty of, the whole lunch was a profoundly weird experience. He seemed to be on edge the whole time. I knew he had had depression, but he was acting very oddly. Admittedly, at times he was quite funny and entertaining, but kept obsessing about various of his BBC news colleagues and how incompetent or ghastly they were. Jeremy Vine copped it more than most. When I left the Langham, I remember thinking ‘well that was weird’.

When The Sun story broke about a famous BBC personality, I just somehow knew it was him. I have a terrible Gaydar, but I do remember wondering about his sexuality, despite knowing he had five children. I also had a number of younger gay friends who told me how attractive they found him, way before the scandal became public.

In some ways. Martin Clunes played a blinder. He looked far more like him than I expected him to, and got his voice quite well too. I thought at times he ventured a little into caricature, and played up to dramatic necessity to make him appear monster-like. We could certainly have done without the w*****g scene, but overall the drama stayed just the right side of the taste line and didn’t go too far into prurience.

When the scandal first broke, I will admit to having some sympathy with Huw, but that soon disappeared when it was revealed that he had accepted and scene nearly 400 images of underage children, some of whom were under ten.

Huw had lived the secret of being gay, or bi, for all his life. He’s not alone in that. He came from a small Welsh village and inevitably led a closeted existence. By the time he acted on his feelings, he was well into middle age. He’s not alone in that. He was also clearly flattered by the attention of young men. He’s not alone in that. However, what he has done is enabled people who have a stereotypical view of dirty old gay men to be reenforced, and that is unforgiveable. Some people still assume all gay men are happy to sleep with anyone else that has a penis, including those who are underage. It is simply untrue. Gay people are no more susceptible to paedophilia than straight people are, yet the myth still persists. And Huw Edwards is partly responsible for that.

So, it’s Virgin River on Netflix tonight…